YOUR CART

Laudation Address by the Chair of the 2002 Prince Claus Awards Committee in honour of Mohammed Chafik, Recipient of the Principal Award

Adriaan van der StaayTranslated from Dutch by Annabel Howland.

The Principal 2002 Prince Claus Award is awarded to Mohammed Chafik (b. 17 September, 1926). This prize is being awarded for both Chafik's academic oeuvre and his tenacious struggle for the emancipation of the Berber people. Chafik's academic work culminated in his bilingual dictionary of Amazigh. This three volume work in Amazigh and Arabic was published in 1990 (vol. I), 1996 (vol. II) and 2000 (vol. III).

It gathered together a vocabulary, collected from Morocco to Libya, from Algeria to Chad, and opened it up not only to Arabic speakers, but also to the Berbers, who found in this book a recognition of the richness of their language. This publication by the Royal Academy of Morocco is the first step on the way to achieving complete equality for the country's original language. Besides this ‘Dictionnaire arabe-berbère', Professor Chafik has also produced work on the thirty-three centuries of Berber culture and has written several educational books.

As if this were not reason enough to present him with the Principal 2002 Award, there is also his tenacious battle for the emancipation of an original, but marginalised people of Morocco, from the Rif to the Atlas. It is above all this people, which has found itself compelled by its poor living standards to migrate to foreign lands, including the Netherlands. This award is therefore also an acknowledgement of the Moroccan minority in the Netherlands. Professor Chafik's career has always been marked by his sense of solidarity with maginalised Berber culture; a career in which he has been an inspirational teacher, a schools inspector, Secretary of State and a tutor to the children of the royal family. He is currently rector of the Institut royal de la culture amazighe, which was founded in 2001.

A clear line thus runs through his life, that of the insertion of Berber culture into the national and international life of his country. The written culmination of this work is the impressive ‘Manifeste berbère' (2000). The title suggests a political pamphlet. However, the piece is more than simply a claim and a list of political demands. It is an attempt to make transparent the history of Morocco, before and after the arrival of the French, before and after independence. He does this by replacing the silenced presence of the Berber-speaking population with its active presence as an often unhappy, but always present historical player.

The life of Mohammed Chafik, which has passed from the French colonial period, through independence and into modern Morocco, makes him an experienced and irrefutable advocate for the liberation of Berber culture. His conclusions are aimed at a better future for Morocco.

I will name a few: the need for a national debate on the position of the Berbers, a constitutional recognition of the language as a national language, a policy for deprived regions, an active insertion of the language in education and government, the erasure of prejudice from the accounts of the nation's history, opening up the media to the language of the people, and the right for parents to register their children under their Berber names.

There are two reasons – his academic research and his work as an emancipator of Berber culture – that make Mohammed Chafik an obvious choice for the distinction of the Prince Fund's highest award. Yet we might also add one more thing that makes him such a distinct figure for the Prince Claus Fund and which makes him stand out beyond his local context. It is what we might call his cultural vision, which is that of an Islamic Humanist. From the Koran he borrows the statement that the diversity of languages is a gift from God. He quotes an old saying: "Learn languages! The more languages you know, the more men you're worth." The idea of turning Arabic into the only language of Morocco leads to impoverishment. The wealth and vitality of a culture is intrinsically bound in with the extent to which it is able to absorb difference. Professor Chafik has thus developed a vision of cultural development as a process that contrasts sharply with thinking within a closed identity.

The Prince Claus Fund recognises in Mohammed Chafik an ambassador for culture and development. By presenting Mohammed Chafik with the Principal 2002 Award, the Prince Claus Fund is also endorsing a vision of the meaning of language and languages in the modern world. Both a mother tongue, which embodies the wealth of one's own cultural identity, and as a contribution to the future in which languages may be regarded as cultural treasure troves for global development and as the collective property of humanity.